As others have noted, the behavior is there for use in lighter-weight debugging/dev situations when you want to interact with the code and also have the ability

As others have noted, the behavior is there for use in lighter-weight debugging/dev situations when you want to interact with the code and also have the ability to inspect what it's doing in detail (either by directly poking things from inside a Python interpreter, or through plugins like the debug toolbar). Trying to design a hyper-efficient compressed query storage mechanism would be massive overkill for such a thing. The simplest thing that could possibly work for this is an in-memory list of the queries as strings, so that's what it does.